* The study of the alabaster and diorite vases found near the pyramids has furnished Petrie with very ingenious views on the methods among the Egyptians of working hard stone.  Examples of stone toilet or sacrificial bottles are not unfrequent in our museums:  I may mention those in the Louvre which bear the cartouches of Dadkeri Assi (No. 343), of Papi I., and of Papi II., the son of Papi I.; not that they are to be reckoned among the finest, but because the cartouches fix the date of their manufacture.  They came from the pyramids of these sovereigns, opened by the Arabs at the beginning of this century:  the vase of the VIth dynasty, which is in the Museum at Florence, was brought from Abydos.

** M. Grebaut bought at the Great Pyramids, in 1887, a series of these ivory sculptures of the Ancient Empire.  They are now at the Gizeh Museum.  Others belonging to the same find are dispersed among private collections:  one of them is reproduced on p. 249 of this History.

[Illustration:  252.jpg STELE OF THE DAUGHTER OF KHEOPS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Bochard.

One would like to possess some of those copper and golden statues which the Pharaoh Kheops consecrated to Isis in honour of his daughter:  only the representation of them upon a stele has come down to us; and the fragments of sceptres or other objects which too rarely have reached us, have unfortunately no artistic value.

A taste for pretty things was common, at least among the upper classes, including not only those about the court, but also those in the most distant nomes of Egypt.  The provincial lords, like the courtiers of the palace, took a pride in collecting around them in the other world everything of the finest that the art of the architect, sculptor, and painter could conceive and execute.  Their mansions as well as their temples have disappeared, but we find, here and there on the sides of the hills, the sepulchres which they had prepared for themselves in rivalry with those of the courtiers or the members of the reigning family.  They turned the valley into a vast series of catacombs, so that wherever we look the horizon is bounded by a row of historic tombs.  Thanks to their rock-cut sepulchres, we are beginning to know the Nomarchs of the Gazelle and the Hare, those of the Serpent-Mountain, of Akhmim, Thinis, Qasr-es-Sayad, and Aswan,—­all the scions, in fact, of that feudal government which preceded the royal sovereignty on the banks of the Nile, and of which royalty was never able to entirely disembarrass itself.  The Pharaohs of the IVth dynasty had kept them in such check that we can hardly find any indications during their reigns of the existence of these great barons; the heads of the Pharaonic administration were not recruited from among the latter, but from the family and domestic circle of the sovereign.  It was in the time of the kings of the Vth dynasty, it would